The vast majority of companies at 81% rely on third-party data and 55% of companies said they are not fully ready for a cookieless world. Safari and Firefox currently block third-party cookies and Google Chrome will follow by the end of 2023.
Twilio announced in its third annual State of Customer Engagement Report, which reflects the findings from a survey of 3,450 business leaders and 4,500 consumers across 12 countries.
The deprecation of cookies will cause even more difficulty for brands who rely on such cookies to identify and track visitors to their websites. This shift will make gathering first-party data essential for business survival, according to the report.
Business leaders recognize this with 95% saying that fully owning and utilizing customer data will be their biggest growth lever over the next three years.
The report also found that there is a disconnect between what companies and consumers think makes a good personalized experience. While 75% of companies think they offer excellent personalized experiences, 52% of consumers disagree and report bad, poor, or average personalization.
“Personalization is actually getting harder to deliver, with high customer expectations, changing technologies, and the diminishing value of third-party cookies. We’ve seen five fundamentals to overcoming these challenges: embrace digital, personalize every interaction, shift to first-party data, close the trust gap, and avoid engagement fatigue by increasing the quality of your interactions,” said Glenn Weinstein, chief customer officer at Twilio.
Overall, the report found that investment in digital customer engagement and personalization technologies has significant, measurable, positive impact on customer retention and trust and on revenues. 70% is the average top-line revenue increase among companies that invested in digital customer engagement over the past two years, while for 7% of responding companies, revenues tripled after investing in digital customer engagement.
